{"id":6855,"date":"2012-07-06T21:47:10","date_gmt":"2012-07-07T01:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/?p=6855"},"modified":"2012-07-06T21:47:10","modified_gmt":"2012-07-07T01:47:10","slug":"did-stan-and-steve-deliberately-soften-spider-mans-origin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2012\/07\/06\/did-stan-and-steve-deliberately-soften-spider-mans-origin\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Stan and Steve deliberately soften Spider-Man’s origin?"},"content":{"rendered":"

We all remember why Peter Parker decided that with great power came great responsibility, right? It’s because way back during his first appearance in Amazing Fantasy<\/em> #15, Spider-Man decided that “from now on I just look out for Number One,” and let a common criminal get away …<\/p>\n

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… resulting in … well … you know how that<\/em> decision turned out. Bye bye, Uncle Ben! <\/p>\n

And it was all Peter’s fault.<\/p>\n

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But if you’d first encountered Spider-Man via his second appearance, you would have found a subtly different origin path.<\/p>\n

Because instead of being directly responsible for the criminal who killed Uncle Ben still being on the loose, Spider-Man was only guilty of being “too late to save him” …<\/p>\n

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… and of being too “busy showing off.”<\/p>\n

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Good thing he “soon caught the killer, and turned him over to the police,” eh?<\/p>\n

So the most central tenet of Spider-Man’s existence vanished between Amazing Fantasy<\/em> #15 (August 1962) and Spider-Man<\/em> #1 (March 1963), and I have no idea how long it took to be restored, because I hadn’t realized it had gone away (I’m very embarrassed to say) until last night, when I reread the latter issue for the first time in a long while after downloading it via the Marvel iPad app<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Either a conscious decision was made that Spider-Man’s selfish action was too harsh a plot point to be allowed to stand and so it was deliberately ignored (only to be reintroduced later), or else it was simply too complicated to delve into during a brief recap. Whichever the case, this makes a big<\/em> difference in Spidey’s superhero motivation, and coming across the abyss of its absence as the character began adventuring in his own title was startling.<\/p>\n

What do you think? A deliberate choice or an unconscious omission? Let me know.<\/p>\n

And if you do, could you also tell me whether everybody else already knows this? (Please tell me no, or else I’ll feel even more foolish that I do now.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We all remember why Peter Parker decided that with great power came great responsibility, right? It’s because way back during his first appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15, Spider-Man decided that “from now on I just look out for Number One,” and let a common criminal get away … … resulting in … well … you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[18,20,23,19,148],"class_list":["post-6855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-comics","tag-marvel-comics","tag-spider-man","tag-stan-lee","tag-steve-ditko"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6855"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6855\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}